If incorrect depictions of India’s borders are a crime, will RSS be prosecuted for ‘Akhand Bharat’?

A law proposed by the Union government makes incorrectly drawn borders a severe offense.

Comically muscular jingoism has been the one of things the Bharatiya
Janata Party has delivered on strongly. Since it came to power, the party has targetted students from
Hyderabad and Delhi, suggested that citizenship should be made contingent on sloganeering abilities and misinterpreted the history of freedom fighter Bhagat Singh. Friday morning bought
the latest installment of the saga: a proposed law to punish incorrect
depictions of India’s borders on a map with seven years in jail and a
fine that must be equal to the annual income of a small Indian
city: Rs 100 crore.
The nub of the issue is that the government of India claims a lot more land than it actually holds. The Jammu
and Kashmir that you see on India maps is a fine thing ­– but it doesn’t really
exist on the ground. Pakistan controls large parts of the western half of Jammu
and Kashmir and China, the Aksai Chin region in the north-east. If you actually
show this ground situation on a map, though, you can be prosecuted by the government
under a 1961 act that now carries a jail term of six months. If
Narendra Modi has his way, that will become seven years.What about Akhand Bharat?
The interesting thing here is that there is
one rather powerful group for which incorrectly depicting India’s borders is
almost at article of faith. The Sangh Parivar believes in what is know as Akhand Bharat
or undivided India. At its smallest, Akhand Bharat includes present-day India,
Pakistan and Bangladesh: basically, the dominions of the British Raj. Other
versions also have Afghanistan, Myanmar, Nepal, Sri Lanka and sometimes even
Tibet sidling into the map.

Image from the RSS website.Hindutva’s irredentist fantasies might not square
up to history or logic but they are core to its philosophy. Leaders of the
Rashtrya Swamaysevak Sangh are frequently seen declaiming against the backdrop
of an Akhand Bharat map and just in December, 2015 Ram Madhav, the general secretary
of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party, made it clear that an Akhand Bharat was a
goal of his.
What will happen after this law? Akhand
Bharat is also an incorrect depiction of India’s borders, after all. Will RSS chief Mohan
Bhagwat be punished? Will the BJP have to give up its Akhand Bharat dreams?

Map of L K Advani's Rath Yatra of 1990

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